OurColoradoLife.com - Life in Parker, Colorado

Colorado Politics – Douglas County

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:54:57 GMT

So it’s time to get involved. How involved? Who knows, we’ll see how things work out. I signed up on the Douglas County Republicans website today, and am going to attend an intro class on Colorado Politics next week. I’ve always threatened that I would like to get involved in politics one day, and have always kept myself out of trouble so that I could! So now it’s time to try to get that ball rolling.

Why now? I figured why not. A couple days ago I received a flyer in the mail about the elections for the Douglas County School Board that are coming up. I actually got involved in that a few months ago, I was out in the yard working when two ladies came by with a petition for getting on the ballot. I signed the petition, my first in Colorado. It was for Meghan Silverthorn.

This morning while reading the paper there was an article about the Douglas County election so I took a closer look. That led me to looking into other information and coming across the DCGOP website. We’ll see how things go next week.

A couple days in the life of a Coloradoan

Chris Hammond — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:31:52 GMT

So the past few days have been COLD! But way fun to say the least. Friday night I drove up to Boulder to look at a car for myself, a Subaru, and a car for a buddy, an 89 RX-7.

Saturday Natalie and I hung out with the neighbors, Mike and Kim, trying out their new hot tub, it works great! Now we just need to put a gate in the fence between the yards so we don’t have to scale it to get over there :)

Colorado Rockies Playoff Games

Chris Hammond — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:29:40 GMT

So tonight was our first night at a playoff game here in Colorado. It was COLLLLLLLDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD. Really cold, from what I hear, record tying cold for a playoff game! We only made it 5 innings, the game didn’t start till 8pm, we left around 10:15 after the 5th.

I’m off again tomorrow to the afternoon game, at least this time the first pitch is at 4:07pm, 4 hours earlier than tonight. Hopefully it’ll be a tad warmer!

Here’s a photo from our nosebleed seats (very last row)

Welcome to OurColoradoLife.com: We moved, so did the domain!

Chris Hammond — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:48:30 GMT

So now that we’ve moved it was time to change up the domain name a little, going2colorado.com was so first half 2009. Welcome to OurColoradoLife.com!

All this time we’ve been using the site to track our adventures with the move, and now that the move is over it is time for the site to grow. So what comes next for the site? I’m overhauling the Flickr photo module I wrote for DotNetNuke, hopefully that will be done in the next week or so. We will also be adding some sections to the site. One of the things we want to do now that we are in Colorado is hike the 14ers, so I’ll be setting up a page and some features on the site to track our progress. There are over 50 fourteen thousand foot peaks in Colorado, our goal is to eventually hike them all!

People were giving me trouble for continuing to tweet about our Colorado adventures and reference #going2colorado so today, that hashtag gets replaced with #OurCoLife I also registered http://www.ourcolife.com just for the hashtag ;)

Stay tuned as OurColoradoLife blossoms, we love it here in this beautiful state, hopefully we can impart to you even a small portion of the beauty that this state offers.

Out and about in Colorado

Chris Hammond — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 06:28:50 GMT

We’ve had a good time so far here in Colorado! I can’t believe we didn’t move here earlier. Last weekend my brother came in town for the holiday, we went all over the place. Saturday we went to SAME Cafe for lunch, even though our friends Brad and Libby were out of the state (they run the place)! I gotta remember that they’re always gone for labor day. From there we drove through Denver and up through Boulder before heading up to a dressage barn for Natalie to watch one of her students ride. Greg and I took off to Estes Park for a couple of hours while she did that.

Boy was that a great move, it’s amazing up there, look what we got to see!

Natalie wasn’t too happy that Greg and I got to see a bear out in the wild, she was wanting to see one as well! Maybe she’ll get to see one this weekend.

Sunday morning we got up early and went to Golden to go rock climbing with some of Greg’s friends who were in town. That was a fun time, I did the least climbing, but took a lot of pictures! Here’s a shot of Natalie

Sunday afternoon Greg and I hit the Cherry Creek trail, he rode our old garage sale bike, I skated. Here’s the data from the trip

Monday we went to Cherry Creek state park to the shooting range and had some fun shooting at targets there, followed by a hike that evening with the dogs.

We went down to Castlewood Canyon State Park, which is only about 13 miles from our house. We hiked a few miles, unfortunately my Garmin was dead and didn’t record any of it, but I got quite a few photos, here are a few of them. It was great having Greg here for a few days, we were worn out by the time he left, I’m still trying to catch up on sleep!

Wednesday I went skating again, I skated further than I think I ever have before, 11.7 miles. I’m going to try to top that distance in the coming week, maybe even on Saturday!

That’s all for now, I think we’re going to hit Breckenridge on Sunday, hopefully with some hiking in the mountains. We’ve gotta start prepping for the 14’rs, we’re hoping to start doing this fall.

Week number 2 in our first home

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:51:36 GMT

So here we are, it is now week #2 in our new home here in Colorado, and we are still loving it!

Even though the past few afternoons we’ve had some brief storms, the weather here is amazing. Here’s a result of yesterday’s storm

The hail didn’t appear to cause any damage to the cars thankfully, it was definitely interesting to see it all coming down, and then a result of the gutters. We were our furniture shopping yesterday, and while we almost bought something I quickly learned that getting a second mortgage instead of doing PMI hits your credit pretty hard. To be frank, my credit score dropped 50+ points in the past week! Oh well, I’ll just have to work harder to pay that portion of the mortgage off quickly. We were going to do no interest financing on the furniture, but I think we’ll just pay cash for it now, so hopefully by Friday we’ll have living room furniture!

We also stopped by the local mall, Park Meadows, holy cow that place is fancy! We hit the Borders to check out the computer book section, thankfully I found a copy of my book!

Tonight we figured out that a garbage disposal will not handle everything. So I had to clean out the pipes under the sink, lesson learned :) We also went skating for the first time in Colorado tonight. Natalie is not as comfortable on skates as I am, of course I’ve been skating for 18 or so years, so it' is understandable why. We went just over 7 miles tonight, if you look at the heart rate on the graphs you can see some data about the skate. We figured out it was mostly downhill the first 3.5 miles, then we turned around and boom, uphill into the wind. You can see my heart rate jumped and pretty much stayed up the whole way back.

On Sunday we got to meet the neighbors behind us, they also closed on their house on the 31st, but they’ve not fully moved in yet as they have a lease until the 24th of this month. They are a couple, around our age, no kids. I think we’re going to get a long great, we must of spend an hour or two talking to them on Sunday, it was nice. The house they purchased was one of the short sales we were bidding on, I think it worked out best for everyone right now, they got a great house, and so did we.

The rest of the weekend consisted of me driving around looking at furniture stores, electronics stores, and a VW car show! That was fun, nothing like the bug shows in California, but way better than any VW show I went to in Missouri. Here are a few photos from the show. I also got the Datsun 240z started up for a bit on Sunday. I’m hoping to get it to a muffler shop this week so I can get it quieted down and then maybe be able to run it a bit more frequently as I try to get it tuned up and drivable. Natalie spent most of the weekend at the barn watching a dressage clinic, though we did go out to dinner with a number of the people from the barn on Saturday night, that was great fun and a good time for Natalie to get to know some people.

This weekend coming up we have a lot planned. Saturday we’re going to go up to Leadville to watch the mountain bike race. A few of my fraternity brother’s are racing in it, as well as Lance Armstrong! That should be fun, we are looking forward to being up high in the mountains for a while. On Sunday I am going to head down to Colorado Springs to the SCCA Autocross down there. I’m thinking I might tow the 240z down there and see if I can’t drive it around on an empty space in the lot for a while to use the area to tune the car while driving, we’ll see if I can get everything together for that!

So that’s our update for now, hopefully everyone is doing well. We are really loving it here in Colorado, and look forward to lots of visitors this winter!

Almost a week, time for an update!

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:02:37 GMT

So we have been in Colorado for a week now, tonight is our 7th night in our home, and we are in heaven! We’ve had a few hickups, I’ll talk about those here to update everyone.

We got here last Thursday and went down to Colorado Springs to get a checking account so we could get a better rate on a mortgage, unfortunately we didn’t have 20% down for our first home, so we did 80/10/10, this bank in the springs was for the second 10. Well, to be frank, the bank sucks. Basically they came in with a different rate than they originally told us, changed numbers at the last minute, and were downright painful to work with. I highly recommend if you ever get the chance to work with TCF Bank that you run away as fast as you can. I plan to pay off that second as fast as we can and get away from TCF Bank.

From there things looked up, closing went alright, once we got thru the bank headaches, and we got the keys to the house. I came to the house in the moving truck while Natalie and her mom ran off and picked up a few things, as I got here the neighbor was outside chasing down the previous owners dogs. They were watching them while they went to the closings and unfortunately the dogs had gotten out. I helped in getting one of them back in their house, a golden retriever who didn’t want to leave our house, and planted himself on the ground. I had to pick half of him up and drag him across the ground! I repeated the process a few hours later when he escaped again.

Unpacking Friday went well, we had the help of some high school kids, and in three hours we had the truck and horse trailer unloaded, far faster than I expected. My parents arrived into town, and Natalie’s father arrived into town later Friday as well. Saturday and Sunday we spent time with our families unpacking and trying to get things going in the house. We shopped for a washer and dryer, finding something on Monday and having it delivered on Tuesday.

Since we moved in we’ve found a few things wrong with the house. Here’s a quick list

Windows that needed tightening up.
A sump pump that was basically flooding the yard
A kitchen sink that started leaking
Carpet with gum embedded in it
a yard that wasn’t mowed
lots of dirty rooms
none of the Ethernet ports were actually wired up in the house
random trash left in and around the house

All in all the week has been good. I’m up and running in my home office, though it is not 100% setup yet, lots of work left to do in it. Natalie has been going to the barn every day to ride her dressage horse, I think she’s very happy with the horse, the barn, and our new home.

We bought a lawn mower off craigslist for $40, it ran, but not well, so I took it apart and found that the intake manifold was broken completely in two. I looked for parts online but didn’t find anything local so I pieced it together best I could with some super glue. I mowed the yard today, or at least most of it, some during lunch, and then more after work until it started raining. I’ll try to finish it up this weekend. I’m going to go ahead and order the replacement manifold as I don’t know if the super glue will hold up to the gasoline.

We’ve still got a long way to go with the house, we don’t have any couches yet, but will spend our time looking for the right items for us.

More pictures and a lot more coming in the next few weeks, stay tuned! Going2Colorado.com isn’t going anywhere any time soon!

Up and running in Colorado

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 06:11:17 GMT

So this will be a quick blog post, but a much needed one nonetheless. We are up and running in Colorado! I’ll post later this week with a full detail of all of our adventures over the past week, but we made it safe and sound, closed on the house, and are now getting through the unpacking process.

I got the office setup today and will begin working tomorrow. Hopefully in the evenings I can get to some much needed unpacking!

A couple of thanks must go out. To our parents, both mine and Natalie’s, thank you for coming to Colorado and helping us! We wouldn’t have been able to get what we did done without you. Auntie Carol, thanks for the wonderful gift, it came today!

Our last night in St. Louis Missouri

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 03:27:25 GMT

So tonight is our last night in St. Louis, we are almost all loaded up, with only a few things to load in the morning, such as our mattresses (sleeping on them on the floor the past couple nights) and a few more things in the garage.

I don’t think we’re going to quite get everything we wanted to loaded up, but we’re going to do our best in the morning. We’ve gotta make a run to a dumpster or two to unload quite a bit of trash, pick up the datsun from down in Fenton, and then head back up here to connect the truck to the horse trailer and head out. Hopefully we’ll have all that done by noon, sooner would be preferred. We’re going to drive 8-10 hours tomorrow, see if we can’t make it to Colby Kansas or there abouts, then park the trucks for the night and finish the drive Thursday morning. I’ll post pictures on twitter from the road http://twitter.com/christoc and will also post a blog tomorrow night assuming we have internet at whatever hotel we stop at.

We’re excited about the move, though I’ll be even more excited when we’re done! We close on the house on Friday, here’s to hoping all goes well!

Chris & Natalie

What will we miss about St. Louis? Our Friends

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:56:04 GMT

So, we have said over and over why we are leaving St. Louis, we want to get away from the weather (humidity), get near the mountains, and have fun in the snow in the winter.

But there’s one reason we don’t want to leave St. Louis, our friends. We are leaving some of the best friends you could ever ask for, and for that we are regretful, I hope that we get to see all of you again very soon in the future. If you are ever in Colorado, please be sure to come visit. We will have the room, and always like seeing friends!

Thank you to everyone who made it out to Dave & Buster’s tonight for our little gathering. We had a great time getting to talk with everyone, and even got to see friends we haven’t seen in MANY years!

If you want to come out and Ski or Snowboard please do, we’ll be waiting for you!

7 days till we leave Missouri!

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:53:04 GMT

Seven Days from now we’ll hit the road and head to Colorado, all of our life’s belongings with us, except the horse which should be there at the barn by the time we leave St. Louis. e’ve got a lot to do between now and then, but I do have all the utilities squared away at the new place. I got internet/TV/phone setup this morning, then called the other less important utilities such as power and gas :D

We’ve been packing up around the house, there’s still a lot left to do, but hopefully we’ll get it finished tonight and Friday. Tomorrow we’re having a little get together at Dave & Buster’s here in town as sort of a going away bash. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=103101229567

Friday Natalie is going to a concert and I’ll begin loading up the trailer. I hope to have an idea if we’ll be able to get everything in the trailer or not, if I can cancel the Budget truck by 10am we won’t get charged. But heck, even if we cancel after 10am, it only costs us $50. In my mind that’ll be $50 well spent, as we have the truck reserved for a Monday pickup if we do need more room for loading things. It’ll also likely tow the 240Z better than the Envoy will.

We’re planning on leaving St. Louis some time on Tuesday, driving roughly half way (Salina Kansas or further) and then finish up the rest of the drive on Thursday. I’ll likely need to go down to Cplorado Springs on Thursday to get a bank account down there for our second mortgage, they’ll give us a discount on the rate if we have an account there for them to ECH from.

Packing up the Garage

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:32:31 GMT

So this weekend’s goal was to get the Garage packed up and ready for the move. I didn’t get much done in there yesterday, mainly just a few things assembled on the 240Z (http://www.project240z.com) today however was a whole different story. I spent 9 hours in the garage, packing, cleaning, assembling, and throwing things out. I managed to get the car running, and even drove it around the circle (check out the 240Z site later for the video).

I packed up the things in the garage that I could get into a box or container. There are a few more things to pack up, but mainly it comes down to getting the boxes out of the garage and onto the trailer next weekend. I have quite a bit of stuff to throw away or scrap. A load of metal I don’t think I want to move, so I’ll try to find a scrap yard this week where I can go and maybe even get some $$$ out of the deal?

Photoslide show of the house

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 06:09:56 GMT

This blog post is going to be shorter than it could be, but for once in my life I’m going to hold back some information. I wouldn’t want anything I might say to jeopardize the closing of our house!

So I was playing around online tonight, go figure, and came across this photo slideshow of the house. These are not photos I took. (here are photos I took)

Flash Not Installed

So we are closing on the 31st of this month. I went out to Colorado last Friday and went on the home inspection. I had a good day, this was my rental car!

I won’t get into too many details on the inspection for a number of potential reasons, but it went very well. Nothing too major was found, and the one item we wanted inspected is getting replaced!

Now we’re in the bind of figuring out how we are going to get to Colorado for closing, hopefully with all of our furniture at the same time. We’re currently planning on loading up the horse trailer and a budget rental truck with all of our stuff, putting the 240Z (www.project240z.com) on the car trailer, and drive all three rigs out the day before closing. We might leave even a day earlier, but in order for that to happen I have to rearrange a work trip that is scheduled Mon-Wed the week we close (we close on Friday). I hope to know if I can rearrange that trip tomorrow.

So we’ve started packing, throwing lots of things out, reorganizing what we have, and want to take with us. We’ve got a long way to go, but I think we’re making good process so far. I’m hoping to get the Datsun back together this weekend and to spend the weekend packing up the garage. If I can get that done it will leave my office, and then clothing. Hopefully Natalie will tackle the kitchen this coming week!

Natalie’s last day at the barn working is tomorrow, it’s a big change for her, not working every day. I look forward to seeing more of her!

Quick update, closing on the 31st

Chris Hammond — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:29:21 GMT

So I have the mother of all blog posts that I need to write, I've been putting it off for a week or so, I will try to get it posted tonight.

In the meantime, we are closing on the house on 7/31!

Ups and downs, three days in the life of Going2Colorado.com

Chris Hammond — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:34:26 GMT

Looks like we might have been hit with a case of seller's remorse, doesn't that just figure?

Progress being made? Maybe, maybe not

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:13:36 GMT

So Saturday at noon I booked a flight for Natalie and I to Denver, for our 5th trip to Colorado for house shopping. There were two homes that popped up last week, at the end of the week, that we thought looked great as prospects for us. We considered putting in offers without even going out and seeing them, but just couldn’t quite pull that trigger. After skating 12 miles Saturday morning, well to be honest I skated 11 and walked the last mile due to hardware issues with my skates, I came home and talked to our agent, and then started looking at flight options. I tried and tried to make Priceline work for us, but the best deal we could get on priceline was $350/person, way more than we wanted to spend. After a few hours of effort I finally came across a last minute deal on Travelocity with airfare and two nights hotel in the Denver Tech Center for $280/person, I booked it and less than four hours later we were on our way.

Play it again sam

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 06:13:07 GMT

At noon today we booked another flight to Parker Colorado, and it’s not midnight here in CO. We got into town around 10pm, drove by the two houses we’re looking at tomorrow to see what things look like at night.

Hopefully tomorrow will be fruitful, two great looking houses, both are NOT short sales. I brought the good camera this trip. Time for bed.

Back from Colorado, Another offer on a Short Sale, Again

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 06:13:34 GMT

Seems like each trip is turning out the same way. We find a few houses, mostly short sales, that we like. We make an offer. Rinse, repeat.

Natalie and I got back from Colorado again this evening. I’ll post a longer update from the trip later, but here’s some pictures of the latest house we’ve offered on. We actually upped our offer A LOT, right before we left this afternoon.

This house appears to be made for us. The upper level is nearly 100% tile floors, which will be great for the dogs. The backyard has hardly any grass in it, and what we saw was being chewed on by one of four dogs, so that will need to be planted/sod. The interesting thing about the backyard is that it is 60% (rough guess) paved, that’s right, paved. There’s concrete all the way around the sides, and somewhat down the middle. You might ask why. Well we figure it’s because of the dogs. Our dogs at the last place we rented ran a track around the yard at the fence, I figure that they paved to account for this.

The inside upstairs is great, only a few things (trim to pain) left to do. The downstairs is another story. It was finished at one point, but our guess is the dogs made a MESS of the carpet, so it was all cut up. The basement doesn’t smell good, but hopefully we can get that corrected if we end up buying the house. It’s a short sale, so who knows if we will ever hear anything on it.

The Front

The Deck

The View

The Kitchen

The Backyard (some of it)

Why are you moving to Colorado?

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:39:18 GMT

When people hear that we are moving to Colorado the most popular question by far is, Why?

Well this is our answer.

This is the view from our hotel room. We hope to find a house with a similar view.

House hunting trip, #5? Parker Colorado

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:52:56 GMT

We’re off to Parker again Thursday through Saturday to take what I think is our 5th house hunting trip? Maybe it’s only trip four, either way, we’ve seen a lot! Hopefully this will be the winning trip.

Title paperwork? Are we getting a house?

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:47:13 GMT

Today I received an email from a title company out of Aurora Colorado, attached to the email was a bunch of title paperwork regarding one of the short sale homes we have a bid on. I didn’t get my hopes up too much though as back in April I received pretty much the same paperwork on this house, with different purchase price numbers as this bid is lower than that other bid. The last time this came through prematurely as the bank hadn’t yet accepted the offer, and it looks like this time it’s the same mistake.

At least we know something is still moving, I called the title company to see what they had to say, they said the bank hadn’t yet come back on the offer, but they were shooting for a July 15th closing if the bank were to accept. So we’ll see what happens, we’re still keeping our fingers crossed as this is the house that is our first choice. We’re looking at another trip out to Parker probably next week to do some more house shopping and possibly start looking at apartments in the area if we’re not able to locate a house here soon.

Finally, a house for sale online with HIGH QUALITY Photos

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:02:55 GMT

So one of the complaints I’ve had in this whole process of looking for a house is the lack of websites that actually show you good photos of a home. For some realtors don’t or can’t upload high quality photos of a house. Well we finally found a home that has high quality photos online, and I must say it is a great thing to see!

Here’s a link to the photos of the house I found. (click on start tour, then click on Full Screen).

http://homesite.obeo.com/viewer/default.aspx?tourid=542611&refURL=&locale=en-US

Now, that tour doesn’t show you the garage, which is another one of my beefs, but it is definitely a step up from most of the listings we’ve seen.

Are you a realtor? Do you realize that people want to see large, high quality photos of a house? Are you not able to upload those to the listing websites?

Prices are dropping

Chris Hammond — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:18:45 GMT

So we gave up on the house we were making offers on earlier in the week. We gave them our final offer and they came back with an offer that wasn't close to that so we are done with offering on that house for a while. I got an email from Realtor.com this morning, it looks like they dropped the price $3k recently, too little too late for us. We'll take a look at making an offer again in the future, but it won't be any more than we've previously offered, perhaps less.

So right now we have two offers out on short sale homes in the Parker area. We're hopefull that one of those will go through, but we're not expecting to hear much back on those any time soon. I did get a realtor.com email last night with an interesting house that just went on the market in Parker, so perhaps we'll see if we can't line up a few more new listings and make another trip out there in the next month and look around.

We're starting to think we may end up doing a short term, month to month, lease on an apartment out there if both of these short sales fall through.

Update on our house hunt in Parker Colorado

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:53:53 GMT

So here we are, two and a half months into our house hunting in Parker Colorado and as of right now we have one offer out there on a short sale, the original short sale we offered on. This third offer was more of a, hey see if you can get the bank to do another appraisal, kind of offer, lower than our rejected offer, but it is still out there.

We were looking at a house in Whooping Crane (street) in Parker Colorado, but the owners have yet to respond to our offers with any sort of a reasonable counter offer. They countered to our final offer, but remain about $5k off the mark, so we’re going to just drop that house and move on. We’ve got another short sale that we are likely going to pursue, the benefits of this house over Whooping Crane are that it is newer, larger, nicer, and has a pool in the neighborhood.

Here are the fronts of the two houses

Whooping Crane

Short Sale

What do you think?

Another reason to move to Colorado?

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:37:05 GMT

An interesting article on MSNBC this morning, yet another reason to move to Colorado!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30991972

If you want to be in the right place when the recovery starts, that place may be in Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Texas or Washington.

The recession didn't start at the same time in every state, and it won't end at the same time either. A new forecast from Moody's Economy.com predicts that jobs growth will return first in those five states, starting in the last quarter of this year. Four of those states benefit from strong high-tech industries, and the fifth, Texas, has a strong base of energy industries.